Tag Archives: Guardian

George Monbiot argues for land tax
It came as a bolt from the blue. Monbiot wrote an article for the Guardian in which he explains why land tax must be implemented. http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/21/a-telling-silence/.
But for those UK Georgists who have been trying to persuade Monbiot for years it is due reward, since high profile advocacy moves debate along.
Monbiot says the loudest silence is about property taxes, that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough. He also quotes from Winston Churchill “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”